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Tuesday, 10 December 2013

A sheepskin manuscript with mysterious, missing artwork

Worcester Cathedral library MS
F.9 is a fourteenth century manuscript of Flavius Josephus’ The Jewish War and the Antiquities of the
Jews, which is thought to have been professionally made by a team of lay
scribes and artists, though the exact location of production is unknown. Unlike
many of our manuscripts, the monks of the Cathedral priory had no physical role
in the production of F9, and we can provide no evidence for the priory owning
the manuscript before the seventeenth century. As to how this MS came to the
Cathedral is a mystery. Upon displaying it to visitors this summer we found it
was a rather curious manuscript indeed, with a lot of scribal quirks and
artistic oddities (such as the one pictured below). This week I explore what
makes F9 an unusual item that stands out from the rest of our collection.
﻿﻿﻿

F9. A detail from the top line of a page, the scribe has drawn a small profile head witha large pointed nose. Photograph

﻿﻿﻿The first unusual point about MS
F9 is that it is made from 324 leaves of thick sheep skin, rather than vellum
(calf skin). This is uncommon for manuscripts of this date. Vellum was the
usual choice of skin after the ninth-century, though the Saxons did reserve
sheepskin for some special liturgical texts (for example the Echternach
Gospels). Sheepskin is greasier than vellum and can often be more translucent,
making painting directly onto it more difficult. F9 evidences some of the
problems associated with using sheepskin for manuscripts. The hair side of
sheepskin parchment yellows overtime and F9 has certain leaves which are
severely yellowed.

This manuscript of The Jewish War has an unusually large
number of (probably contemporary) repairs also; every few folios you will find
a hole which has been sewn or repaired by pasting another bit of parchment on
top. There are more holes found in F9 than you would normally find with a
vellum manuscript, because the layers of sheepskin are fattier, therefore more
prone to separating and allowing holes to develop. Even in cases where small
holes are stitched up, it is not uncommon that the hole continues to grow and
eventually bursts open the repair.

Yet by far the most puzzling thing about F9 is to be found
on folio 229 (see pic below), where we can see that the artist has drawn out
the border and square of an illuminated letter but left the space blank. A
similar blank space for a decorated initial with a border is left on folio
230.Illumination is generally accepted
as the last stage in manuscript production. Only once the scribe or scribes
have written the text block will the quires of parchment be passed on to an
artist or a team of artists for decorating. Could it be that the artist simply
forgot these pages? Did they make a mistake? Was the illuminated letter stolen
from the manuscript at a later date?

We will
never definitively know the answer as to why these two folios remain undecorated.
It cannot be because they were considered unimportant, for within the
manuscript folio 229 marks the beginning of the prologue by Josephus and folio
230 signals the beginning of the main text of The Jewish War. I also think it’s unlikely that these pages were
forgotten, for the artist took the time to draw the title of the section at
the top of the page in alternating blue and red. Moreover, the scribes
or the artists have continued throughout the book to extend the
descenders of letters on the last line of each page and embellish them artistically either with grotesques or frilled designs.

Looking at the
manuscript, I’d like to suggest that there is evidence that these two
illuminated letters with part borders were done, or at least designed, on a
separate piece of parchment which was intended to be pasted onto the main body
of the manuscript at the end. This was not an uncommon practice for
illustrators working on sheepskin. As early as the ninth-century, according to
Bischoff, miniatures were being painted onto separate pieces of calfskin and
pasted onto folios of sheepskin, because the rough surface of calfskin proved
better suited for coloured painting.[1]

Looking
through F9, you can see instances where the translucency of the sheepskin
causes coloured inks to bleed from the verso to the recto, which must surely
have been a source of frustration for the artists! Below is a picture of a
completed illuminated initial in blue from f. 279. You can see that the
sheepskin has been difficult to paint onto, and when the book has been closed,
blue ink has bled onto the opposite page as the greasy nature of sheep skin means
it struggles to absorb paint. It seems likely that these sizeable spaces have
been left, then, with intention of pasting completed artwork onto them so as to
avoid the inks running through to the underside of the page or blotting onto
the other. If you run your finger over folio 229 (pictured above), the border is definitely raised suggesting that the outline in blue may be pasted down.

F9. an illuminated letter with border, looking to the opposite page there is blue ink which has been transferred. Photograph

Perhaps
the ultimate question with F9 is not 'why are these two folios missing
decoration' but 'why did the stationer or workshop in which the manuscript was
made opt for sheep skin in the first place, when it was known to be of lesser
quality'? It could be that calf skins were in short supply at that time in the
region where the manuscript was made, but we have no way of knowing this
because no information or research has been done to shed light on where this manuscript was produced. Though
we currently know little about the context of the production of this manuscript, F9 nonetheless provides a useful contrast to the rest of Worcester Cathedral Library's manuscript
collection, the majority of which is done on vellum. It also evidences how making manuscripts, even in a professional
context, could still have many challenges in the later middle ages and suggests that artists and scribes had to come up with inventive solutions to circumvent the challenges of working on sheepskin.